Father and farther,
’til we know?
Father and farther,
Father and farther,
’til we know?
Father and farther,
yeah, how much farther
’til we know?
Sometimes, Father, you and I
are like a three-legged horse
who can’t get across the finish line
no matter how hard he tries and tries and tries...
That was two years before I owned a computer and three years before I had logged on to the Internet, so I wrote the first few rough drafts of those lyrics by hand, then typed a few more drafts on my Brother word processor, printed the final draft, folded it into an envelope, drove over to Jim and Shelly’s house on the other side of Spokane, and dropped it in their mailbox.
A week later, Jim called me.
“I finished the song,” he said. “Come over to my work. And we’ll listen.”
Jim was working as a counselor at a residential addiction treatment center for Native teenagers. At the front door, he handed me a cassette tape.
“There’s the song,” he said. “Listen to it and let me know what you think.”
I walked back to my car and slid the tape into the stereo and heard the first chords of “Father and Farther.” And, as I listened, I noticed that Jim was outside playing basketball with a few of the at-risk youth. Jim was a good athlete. He was funny. He and those boys laughed and laughed as they shot hoops. And I heard that sad and beautiful song for the first time.
Jim and I had created art together. It was the first time I had collaborated with another artist. It was the beginning of a personal and creative friendship that would lead Jim and me, along with Jerry Stensgar, bass player, and Alfonso Kolb, drummer, to share the stage with the Indigo Girls, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and Dar Williams. We played dozens of shows at music venues in Spokane, Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, and at numerous colleges in big and small towns.
Jim, Jerry, and Alfonso would play the songs that Jim and I had written together. And they’d play Jim’s songs. And they would play music as I read my poems. And we’d perform songs where Jim sang as I read poetry.
When I first performed with Jim, I did it in character, as a Spokane Indian man named Lester FallsApart, a drunk and homeless Indian who wasn’t afraid to be profane and brutally honest. As Lester FallsApart, I was able to break through my inhibitions and improvise stories. I learned how to be funny onstage.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Jim once said to me. “You get onstage and you’re not afraid of anything. I get onstage and I’m afraid of everything.”
“It’s because of you,” I said. “You and your music are like armor for me.”
Over the years, I dropped the Lester FallsApart character and performed only as myself.
Jim and I wrote songs together that appeared on the soundtracks of the two movies I wrote, Smoke Signals and The Business of Fancydancing.
Jim and I self-released an album, Reservation Blues, to accompany my novel of the same name about an all-Indian Catholic rock ’n’ roll band.
At my wedding to Diane, my powerful Hidatsa wife, Jim played a cover of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” and Shelly was our official photographer.
The years and events blend together. I cannot give you the exact chronology. Jim and I are artists. We are reservation-raised Indians. We are indigenous poets. Time works differently for us than it does for most other people.
But I do know that, somewhere during our separate and paired journeys, Jim and I lost the creative spark we had together. We stayed friends, but our artistic careers went in separate directions. He released many other albums, traveled the world with his music, and was inducted into the Native American Music Hall of Fame. I published many books, traveled the world, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Jerry Stensgar, the bass player, died.
Alfonso Kolb, the drummer, moved back to his reservation in California and serves on their Tribal Council.
Jim and Shelly lost a son to a sudden suicide.
My father died of alcoholism, a slow suicide.
At my father’s funeral, Jim played “Father and Farther,” and I wept harder than I ever have in my life.
After that, Jim and I would talk on the phone once or twice a year. I’d often bump into him when I was visiting Spokane.
We always promised to write a new song together.
To do another show.
To share the stage.
He and Shelly came to my mother’s funeral. And I was positive that he played a song in honor of my mother, but now I’m not sure if he did. My memory, often distorted by my storyteller’s impulse, is now also distorted by the aftereffects of my brain surgery and seizures.
Then, eleven months after my mother’s death, I received a text in the night from John Sirois, another Colville Indian and one of my best friends.
Jim was dead.
A week after Jim’s funeral, at the Bing Theater in Spokane, John Sirois sang one last honor song for Jim, and I improvised a eulogy.
I said, “Jim was so beautiful. He was so damn Indian-looking, too. He was like the Before Columbus Indian, and I am the After Columbus Indian.”
I said, “At my wedding, Jim was walking in the hotel in front of me in the lobby. And some little white kid, a stranger, looked at Jim and said, ‘Mom, that’s a real Indian.’ His embarrassed mother tried to shush her kid. But I said, ‘It’s okay, I’m an Indian, too,’ and that little shit white kid pointed at Jim and said, ‘But not Indian like him.’”
I said, “Jim was the first Indian man to ever tell me how much he liked my poems.”
I said, “I always figured Jim and I would get back onstage someday. Like we’d do an Honoring the Ancient Elders concert where we’d honor the ancient elders we’d become.”
I said, “Jim was a musician you could always trust onstage. And he was a person you could always trust offstage.”
I said, “I don’t have any regrets about my life with Jim. We didn’t get to share the stage one last time. But he and I made art together. And we had so many adventures on the road. We laughed so much.”
I said, “He and I were flying in a little plane together. Before nine-eleven. When you could see the pilots in the cockpit. When you could walk right up to them if you wanted. We were flying and hit some turbulence. And it felt like the plane almost flipped upside down. The plane was bumping up and down. It was scary. Jim and I were sitting across the aisle from each other. We looked at each other. Then we looked at the pilots. Those pilots looked at each other and laughed about the turbulence. So Jim and I looked at each other and laughed about the turbulence, too. And I guess that’s what I will always remember most about him. That will be my most lasting memory. My brother, Jim Boyd, laughing about turbulence.”
“Shelly Boyd called me,” I said to my wife. “She asked if I would perform at the tribute to Jim in Buffalo.”
“When?” my wife asked.